Andreas Altmann was born in Hainichen (Saxony) and now lives in Berlin. He studied social pedagogy and works as a social worker. He has published seven collections of poetry and won several poetry prizes, among them the 2012 Prize for Literature of the Saxon Ministry of Art.

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) was an English political analyst and social theorist who in his later years served as editor of the Economist. He was also a co-founder of the British quarterly National Review (1855–1864), in which he published his political analysis as well as his literary assessments of Shakespeare, Shelley, Dickens, Gibbon, Scott, Macaulay, and others. His books include The English Constitution (1867), Physics and Politics (1872), and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873). His essays were collected posthumously in the volumes Literary Studies (1879), Economic Studies (1880), and Biographical Studies (1881).

Laura Bell was born in Ohio and graduated from Douglass College, Rutgers University, studying with Robert Watts. At Goddard College, in Vermont, she did graduate work with painter Anne Tabachnick. For more than a decade she has used photos and found images in her paintings, and has created a collaborative collage series, “The Corpses,” with poet Ian Ganassi. Her work has been exhibited in New York City, Provincetown, New Haven, Philadelphia, Berlin, and elsewhere, and she has been an artist-in-residence at the Millay Colony. She lives and works in the Bronx, New York.

Linda Bierds’s ninth book of poetry, Roget’s Illusion (Putnam, 2014), was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her poems have appeared in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry, among others. In addition to being awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, Bierds has received the PEN/West Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the Grace Pollock Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington and lives on Bainbridge Island.

Alexander Booth is a writer and translator currently living in Berlin. A recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translations of Lutz Seiler’s in field latin (Seagull Books, 2016), he has also published his own poems and other translations in numerous print and online journals.

Ron Carlson is the author of six story collections and six novels. His fiction has appeared in the Atlantic, Esquire, Harper’s, the New Yorker, and many others, and has been selected for The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and more. He is the Director of the Graduate Program in Fiction at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in Huntington Beach, California.

Gerald Chapple taught German and Comparative Literature at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and is a freelance literary translator. He has published translations of almost a hundred of Günter Kunert’s poems, along with works by Barbara Frischmuth, Josef Haslinger, Stefan Heym, and others. Some have appeared in Fiction, Modern Poetry in Translation, Agni, Grand Street, Osiris, the Literary Review, Antioch Review, and Words without Borders. The winner of an Austrian government Translation Award in 1996, he is at work on a book of translations of Kunert’s poems with the working title A Stranger at Home: Selected Poems 1979–2009.

Peter Chilson teaches literature and writing at Washington State University. His essays, journalism, and fiction have appeared in American Scholar, Audubon, Ascent, High Country News, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Foreign Policy, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. In 2012 he went to Mali for Foreign Policy magazine to write about the civil war.

David Chorlton was born in Spittal-an-der-Drau, Austria, grew up in Manchester, England, and lived for several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. As much as he has come to love the Southwest, he has strong memories of Vienna, the setting for his work of fiction, The Taste of Fog (Rain Mountain Press, 2011). His most recent work includes Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2014) and A Field Guide to Fire, his contribution to the Fires of Change exhibition shown in Flagstaff and Tucson.

Daniela Danz is a German poet and novelist. Her poetry includes the volumes Pontus and V, and her most recent novel is Lange Fluchten. She is widely published in German anthologies and journals. Danz lives in Kranichfeld and is head of the Schillerhaus museum in Rudolstadt.

Tamas Dobozy is a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. He has published three books of short fiction, When X Equals Marylou (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003), Last Notes and Other Stories (Arcade, 2006), and most recently Siege 13: Stories (Milkweed Editions, 2013), which won the Rogers Writers’ Trust of Canada Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for both the Governor General’s Award: Fiction and the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He has published over fifty short stories in journals such as One Story, Fiction, Agni, and Granta, and won an O. Henry Prize in 2011.

Iain Galbraith was born in Scotland, and studied languages and Comparative Literature at the universities of Cambridge, Freiburg, and Mainz. A winner of the John Dryden Translation Prize and Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation, he is also editor of five poetry anthologies. His own poems have appeared in Poetry Review, PN Review, Times Literary Supplement, New Writing, and other journals. His book-length translations include Alfred Kolleritsch’s Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2006), W. G. Sebald’s Across the Land and the Water (Penguin, 2012), and Jan Wagner’s Self-portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015), for which he received the Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize.

Durs Grünbein, born in Dresden, has published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, most recently the poetry collection Cyrano oder Die Rückkehr vom Mond (Suhrkamp, 2014) and the volume of memoirs Die Jahre im Zoo: Ein Kaleidoskop (Suhrkamp, 2015). His many awards include the Georg Büchner Prize (1994), Premio Internazionale di Poesia Pier Paolo Pasolini (2006), the Great Cross of Merit with Star (2009), and the Tomas Tranströmer Prize (2012). He lives in Berlin and Rome.

James Allen Hall is the author of Now You’re the Enemy (University of Arkansas Press, 2008), winner of awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Hall’s memoir in lyric essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, was named the winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s essay competition, and will be published in 2017. He teaches creative writing and literature at Washington College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Henry Kearney, IV is from Robersonville, North Carolina, and he received his MFA from Warren Wilson College. His work has appeared in Midwest Quarterly, Ghost Ocean Magazine, Spoon River Poetry Review, Cortland Review, and the Collagist.

Esther Kinsky, born in Engelskirchen and currently residing in Berlin, is a poet, novelist, photographer, and translator of Russian, Polish, and English. She has lived in London and Hungary, and studied Slavic Languages and Cultures and English in Bonn and Toronto. In 2009 she was awarded the Paul Celan Prize for translation. Her most recent volume of poetry is Am kalten Hang (2016); her many novels include Sommerfrische (2010) and Am Fluß (2014), for which she was awarded the 2015 Kranichsteiner Literaturpreis. In 2016, Kinsky received the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize for her life’s work.

Sarah Kirsch (1935–2013) was one of Germany’s most powerful lyric poets of the postwar era. She lived and worked in East Germany until 1979, when, after political persecution, she moved to the West. In Ice Roses (Carcanet, 2014), comprising around a hundred poems from the ten collections Kirsch published between 1967 and 2001, the translator Anne Stokes introduced Anglophone readers to the full range of Kirsch’s poetry. “Winter” features many elements of what was dubbed the “Sarah sound”: speech cadences, colloquialisms, and a free-flowing syntax that reflects Kirsch’s lifelong resistance to constraint and convention.

Marie Luise Knott has authored, edited, and translated over twenty books. She is a former editor-in-chief of the German edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. Knott has translated and edited volumes into German, including the work of poets Anne Carson and John Cage. Her recent books include Unlearning with Hannah Arendt (Other Press, 2014) and, as editor in both German and English, the Hannah Arendt–Gershom Scholem Correspondence (Suhrkamp, 2010; University of Chicago Press, 2017). She lives and works in Berlin.

Günter Kunert was born in Berlin in 1929, where he survived World War II before being “encouraged” to leave for the West in 1979. In addition to lyric poetry, he has written short stories and a novel, essays and autobiographical works, satires, fairytales, science fiction, radio plays, speeches, travel writing, film scripts, and drama. The poems here, “Legacies” (1974) and “Historical Consciousness” (1980), reflect both Kunert’s debt and his reaction to Brecht, an early mentor. Kunert has received numerous literary awards, including the Heinrich Mann Prize in 1962, the Becher Prize in 1973, and the America Award in Literature in 2009 for “a lifelong contribution to international writing.”

Christine Lavant (1915–1973), from Groß-Edling, Carinthia, southern Austria, was a student of religious, mystical, and philosophical literature. Known by the pen name she took from her native valley, she was the recipient of several major Austrian literary awards, including the Georg Trakl and Anton Wildgans Prizes. The originals of the poems featured in this issue first appeared in Die Bettlerschale [The Begging Bowl] in 1956.

Karen Leeder is a writer, critic, and translator, and is Professor of Modern German Literature at New College, Oxford. Recent publications include Volker Braun, Rubble Flora: Selected Poems (Seagull Books, 2014), with David Constantine, which was commended for the Popescu Poetry Prize in 2015, and the edited collection Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Her translations of Durs Grünbein have appeared in a number of magazines including Poetry Review and Poetry. She was awarded the Stephen Spender Prize in 2013, an English PEN award, and an American PEN/Heim award in 2016.

Margitt Lehbert has published translations of Elizabeth Bishop, Les Murray, Paul Muldoon, and many other poets in German. Her translations into English include The Poems of Georg Trakl (Anvil Press Poetry), Sarah Kirsch’s Winter Music (Anvil Press Poetry), and Michael Augustin’s Koslowski: 52 Pointers from Hearsay (Arc Press). She lived in Sweden for twelve years, where she founded the small press Edition Rugerup. She currently lives and works in Berlin.

Birgit Bunzel Linder has received degrees from the University of Cologne, Germany, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She teaches Chinese and comparative literature, Gothic literatures, madness and literature, and Medical Humanities at the City University of Hong Kong. She has published poetry and photography in Asian Cha, the International Literature Quarterly, Cerebration, Kavya Bharati, Clockwise Cat, Mad Poets Review, and various other anthologies. In 2012, she won the International Proverse Prize for Unpublished Poetry for her 2013 collection Shadows in Deferment, and in 2016 she received the Arts Development Council Award for Literary Arts for her forthcoming collection of poetry Bliss of Bewilderment.

Marius von Mayenburg’s work, which includes The Ugly One, The Stone, Perplex, Martyr, and A Piece of Plastic, has been translated into thirty languages and performed in Germany and abroad. Alongside his activities as playwright, Mayenburg is also a theater director and has translated plays by writers such as William Shakespeare, Martin Crimp, and Sarah Kane.

Leah McCormack is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Dakota. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Redivider, Prairie Fire, Fiction, North Dakota Quarterly, REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters, and Portland Review, among others. She has her PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Cincinnati and her MFA in creative writing from the City College of New York.

Jane Mead is the author of four collections of poems and the recipient of grants and awards from the Whiting, Guggenheim, and Lannan foundations. The selections presented here are from her new book-length poem, World of Made and Unmade (Alice James, 2016). She farms in northern California.

David Mura has written four books of poetry, most recently The Last Incantations (Northwestern University Press, 2014). He is the author of two memoirs, Turning Japanese (Grove Atlantic, 1991), which won the Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Award, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality & Identity (Anchor, 1996). Mura teaches at VONA and is Director of Training for the Innocent Classroom, a program that addresses the racial achievement gap by training teachers to improve their relationships with students of color.

Ricardo Pau-Llosa has published seven collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Man (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014). He is also an art critic and curator.

Joseph Pearson was born in Canada and has lived almost a decade in Berlin, where he is a writer and cultural historian. He runs a writing workshop at the Universität der Künste and teaches at New York University Berlin. He is the essayist of the Schaubühne, Germany’s most prominent theater; the voice of the city blog, The Needle; and author of the forthcoming Berlin Cityscopes, a creative nonfiction portrait of the metropolis (Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Stanley Plumly is the author of the forthcoming collection Against Sunset (W. W. Norton, 2016) and The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb (W. W. Norton, 2014). He is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland.

Lia Purpura is the author of eight collections of essays and poems, most recently It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Penguin, 2015). She is Writer in Residence at the University of Maryland and teaches in the low residency MFA program at the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington.

Harry Roddy is a poet, translator, and associate professor of German at the University of South Alabama. He has published scholarship on twentieth- century German literature, as well as translations of the poets Farhad Showghi and Daniela Danz. He lives with his family in Mobile, Alabama.

Ulrike Almut Sandig was born in Saxony in the former East Germany and now lives in Berlin. She has published four volumes of poetry as well as short stories and radio plays. Her newest collection is ich bin ein Feld voller Raps, verstecke die Rehe und leuchte wie dreizehn Ölgemälde übereinandergelegt (2016). She has collaborated on various projects with musicians and sound artists, producing the CD Märzwald (2011). Sandig has won numerous prizes including the Leonce-and-Lena Prize (2009) and the Droste Prize for Emerging Talent (2012).

Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, a town in the eastern part of the state of Thuringia in the former German Democratic Republic. He has published a novel (winner of the German Book Prize in 2014) and over six volumes of poetry, short stories, and essays. He is a member of the Saxon Academy of the Arts, Dresden, and the Academy of Arts, Berlin. He lives outside of Berlin and Stockholm.

Sophie Seita’s published works include Meat (Little Red Leaves, 2015), Fantasias in Counting (BlazeVOX, 2014), 12 Steps (Wide Range, 2012), and I Mean I Dislike That Fate That I Was Made To Where, a translation of Uljana Wolf (Wonder, 2015). Her play Don Carlos, or, Royal Jelly has been performed at Company Gallery in New York. She has received fellowships and awards from Princeton, Buffalo, Cambridge, Columbia, DAAD, and Studienstiftung, and a PEN/Heim award for her translation of Uljana Wolf’s Subsisters: Selected Poems (Belladonna, 2017). She is a Junior Research Fellow in English at Queens’ College, Cambridge.

Anne Stokes’s most recent book-length translation of poetry by Sarah Kirsch, Ice Roses: Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2014), features over one hundred poems from Kirsch’s ten collections, and was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld and the Popescu European Translation Prizes in 2015. Her translation of Monika Rinck’s poem “pfingstrosen” [“peonies at pentecost”] was commended by the Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize in the same year. She recently translated into English the German bestseller This House Is Mine (St. Martin’s Press, 2016) by Doerte Hansen. Stokes teaches German and Translation Studies at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of eight collections of poetry and prose, most recently Catechism: A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2010) and Six: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2016), selected by C. D. Wright as the winner of the AROHO/To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. A recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir and grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and reviews regularly for the Rumpus and Lambda Literary Review. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives on Hollywood Beach.

Jan Wagner studied English in Hamburg, Dublin, and Berlin, where he has lived since 1995. A poet, essayist, and translator of British and American poetry, he has published six volumes of poetry including, most recently, Regentonnenvariationen (Rain Barrel Variations, 2014). His collection of essays, Die Sandale des Propheten [The Prophet’s Sandal ], appeared in 2011, and a selection of poems in English translation, Self-portrait with a Swarm ofBees, came out from Arc Publications in 2015. He has received many awards, including the Wilhelm Lehmann Prize (2009), the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize (2011), and the Prize of the Leipzig Bookfair (2015).

Peter Waterhouse, born in 1956 in Berlin to an Austrian mother and British father, has lived in Vienna since 1975. He studied English and German at the University of Vienna, where he completed a doctorate on the poetry of Paul Celan. He is the recipient of the country’s highest literary honor, the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2012). In addition to novels, plays, and essays, he has published half a dozen books of poetry. He is also a translator from English and Italian, and the co-founder of the Viennese translation movement Versatorium, whose collective translations of Charles Bernstein won the City of Münster Prize for International Poetry (2015).

Uljana Wolf lives and works in Berlin and Brooklyn. She has published three volumes of poetry, kochanie ich habe brot gekauft (2005), falsche freunde (2009), and Meine schönste Lengevitch (2013), as well as the essay “Box Office” (2010) and a joint sonnet erasure project with Christian Hawkey, “Sonne from Ort” (2012). Among the English-language poets she has translated into German are Matthea Harvey, Erín Moure, John Asbery, Yoko Ono, and Cole Swensen. Her own work has been translated into more than thirteen languages. She has received numerous prizes for her literary works and translations, including the Peter Huchel Prize and the Dresden Poetry Prize. Wolf teaches German and literary translation at New York University and the Pratt Institute.

Chelika Yapa received her MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, where she was awarded a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. Her personal essays have appeared in Glamour, Mamm, and Now. “Follow-Up” is her first published fiction, drawn from the experience of having been diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of twenty-two. She is grateful to her writing instructor, Lou Mathews, for his friendship and support.

Maja Zade is a dramaturg at the Schaubühne Berlin, where she has worked with directors such as Thomas Ostermeier, Ivo van Hove, Luk Perceval, Benedict Andrews, and Marius von Mayenburg. Her translations into German include works by Lars von Trier, Arnold Wesker, and Caryl Churchill, and she has translated into English works by Marius von Mayenburg, Roland Schimmelpfennig, Lars Norén, and Falk Richter.

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